Bone should know
because his sighting on the night of February 21, 1973, precipitated the
great Brushy Creek UFO scare and brought flying saucers back into the headlines
four years after the Condon Committee declared them a dead issue. In sheer
quantity of reports the Missouri flap parallels the famous waves of the
mid-1960's. UFOS, whatever they are, probably are going to be as significant
a part of the '70's.

Southeastern Missouri
seems an unlikely place for something so out of the ordinary. In a heavily-forested
section of Wayne County between two giant man-made lakes in the eastern
Ozarks, Clearwater and Wappapello, the Brushy Creek area encompasses Piedmont
(population 1500) to the north and Mill Spring (population 225) to the
south. The region is rich in both natural beauty and lead deposits but
is not known for much else. Certainly its friendly but skeptical inhabitants
were unprepared for a UFO invasion or the international attention following
in its wake.

High school basketball
coach Bone was no believer in UFOs -- at least not before the night of
February 21 when with two team managers and three of his players he was
returning home along U.S. Highway 60 near Ellsinore, Mo., about 20 miles
south of Piedmont. They were in poor spirits after losing a crucial tournament
game by seven points and were rehashing their defeat. Suddenly Bone, who
was driving, noticed a "bright shaft of light beaming down out of
the sky."

A few miles later
as the car passed through the Brushy Creek area, player Randal Holmes noticed
something else. "Look!" he shouted. "There's that thing
we saw back on Highway 60!" Bone pulled over to the side of the road
and the six piled out.

"It looked like
it was about 200 yards off the road hovering over an open field,"
Bone said later. (Investigators from the International UFO Bureau (IUFOB)
of Oklahoma City later estimated the object probably was about 400 feet
above the ground.) "it was impossible to determine the size or shape
because of the darkness. Anyway, we saw four lights that looked like portholes:
red, green, amber and white. We figured they were about three or four feet
apart, all in a row."

"We just stood
there and watched it for about 10 minutes," Cary Barks, another witness,
added. "Then all of a sudden the lights went directly up in the air
with absolutely no noise and just disappeared over a hill."

Half an hour later
Mrs. Edith Boatwright of nearby Mill Spring saw the same or a similar object
flying low near her farmhouse. "It was about 10:00 P.M.," she
told FATE. "I was lying on my bed -- I wasn't asleep -- when I saw
a flashing light. We live close by the highway so I thought something had
happened on the road. I got out of bed quickly and looked over the lower
part of the curtain and I could see very plainly a craft just clearing
the utility wires. It was in a horizontal position. I think there were
people in it. I could see objects inside but could not make out any form
of a person. It made a very quiet noise like a whoosh slowly and evenly.
When it changed into a vertical position, it made a louder noise, like
a quiet motor pulling.

Edith
Boatwright of Mill Spring, Mo., sketched the UFO she observed near her
farmhouse on the night of February 21, 1973, as it flew low with its lights
flashing.

"It didn't have
any chopper blades on top like a helicopter, just some rotary-like blades
in front where an umbrella-like part extended up. It was about 30 or more
feet long -- very beautiful light-colored body with a darker tail.

"There were
no lights on in our house at the time. I watched it for about one or two
minutes. It was about 200 or 250 yards from my window, flying below the
oak treetops."

At first Mrs. Boatwright
thought the object was "some kind of new nuclear-powered helicopter"
but changed her mind in the next few days when she heard about the flood
of UFO sightings. It is worth noting, however, that the "whooshing"
sound Mrs. Boatwright reported was not heard by other southeastern Missouri
UFO witnesses. Conceivably helicopter blades could have made that sound
and IUFOB's Daniel Garcia who interviewed the witness believes it is at
least possible that the object was a military aircraft dispatched to the
area to look for Bone's UFO. Arguing against this idea is the fact that
the craft as described by Mrs. Boatwright did not look like a helicopter.

Whatever the case,
in the next two months the Boatwrights' farm was to play host to other
UFOs including one that apparently landed on a hill behind the house. "We
didn't try to go near it as we had company coming at the time," Mrs.
Boatwright explains.

On February 22, the
night after the original Bone-Boatwright sightings. Roy and Beth Burch
and Mrs. Kathy Keith, driving in the Brushy Creek area, spotted an object
"blinking green, white, amber and red." Burch tried to chase
the UFO along the highway.

"Roy started
speeding up to get a close look at it," Mrs. Keith said. "He
was doing about 70 miles an hour but we still lost it. We got to the Creek
area and there were some other Piedmont people standing on the road looking
at it."

One of them, Bob
Smith, had binoculars focused on the UFO but he could not make out any
shape. The lights were visible for 10 minutes longer and then sank over
a hill.

Four nights later,
on the 26th, Pat Toney and Will Freeman watched a luminous object moving
over the trees near the Tip Top Mountains. The UFO about 500 yards away
"was solid with prongs on it," Miss Toney informed the IUFOB.
"A red light was on it."

By far the great
majority of sightings in the Piedmont-Brushy Creek-Mill Spring area were
the kind UFOlogists call "nocturnal lights" -- brilliant flashing
lights far enough away that witnesses cannot discern their source.

From February 21
into late April sightings occurred almost nightly. The Piedmont police
received over 500 reports and IUFOB director Hayden Hewes told FATE he
and his associates, who conducted a detailed investigation, interviewed
200 witnesses. Most of the sightings were fairly routine as UFO reports
go and not very revealing. We will concentrate on the more unusual sightings.

MOST RESIDENTS
saw the UFOs more than once. Even so, Earl Turnbough's experience was
unique for he had three unusually vivid sightings of more than just lights.

His first encounter
took place around 9:00 P.M. about the first of March. Turnbough had just
passed over a hill on Highway 49 when he spotted something "lit up
like a circus" hovering over the road in front of him. The lights
went out within seconds and presumably the object escaped in the darkness.

Two weeks later on
March 14 as Turnbough drove through the same area in a thunderstorm he
saw an amber light hovering 30 feet above a field less than 200 yards from
him.

"I slowed down
and watched for five or 10 minutes," Turnbough said. "When the
lightning flashed I could see a dome-shape with sort of an antenna at the
top. This amber light was shining from the antenna. All the other lights
were off. I would say the thing was between 15 and 20 feet in diameter.
It wasn't making any noise at all."

He saw a UFO for
the third time a week later. "I was feeding cattle at the farm just
about dark and I saw this thing come down over Brushy Creek," he explained.
"It was about a thousand feet in the air and shaped like a top. I
couldn't tell if it was rotating or if the lights were just flashing. The
lights were yellow, green and red. They could've been portholes for all
I know. The object sailed over the farm and didn't make a sound."

March 14, the same
night as Turnbough's second sighting, Mrs. Maude Jefferis, a photography
teacher at Piedmont's Clearwater High School, took a series of pictures
of "a small reddish ball" high in the air. She spotted the object
around 11 o'clock and mounting a Crown Graphic 4x5 camera on a tripod,
she took a 10-minute time exposure which unfortunately shows little more
than a dot in the night sky.

"As a professional
photographer," she said, "I cannot explain the object. It is
not a lens flare or light reflection."

Mrs. Jefferis is
referring to a theory proposed by Dr. J. Allen Hynek of Northwestern Univer-
sity, former U. S. Air Force UFO consultant, who arrived in Piedmont on
March 31, talked briefly with eight persons and left 24 hours later. Hynek's
suggested explanation also has been disputed by photographic experts at
the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, who say that a lens flare would be widespread
over the entire negative rather than a small speck. They further point
out that the lens in Mrs. Jefferis' camera is coated to prevent flares.

That same evening
Carl Laxton saw an object shaped, he told IUFOB, "like a barrel with
protrusions like arms sticking out of it . . .

"The only way
I could see the shape of this thing was when the object seemed to tilt;
a brilliant white light appeared to go behind it. The object was tilting
from a vertical to a horizontal position and then back to a vertical position
again. Then it moved straight up and disappeared into the night sky."

Seven days later,
on March 21, Mrs. Jean Coleman and Mrs. Cathy Leach were crossing the Clearwater
Dam about 9:00 P.M. when they saw an object rise out of the lake. Theirs
is one of the most spectacular sightings reported.

They were first alerted
by a "red flash" on the lake. Stopping their car, they got out
to see blinking lights ascending. Each time a red light flashed, the object
got brighter.

"We could see
it climbing," Mrs. Coleman said. "It looked like the lights were
red, white and yellow. There was no sound. We tried to make out the shape
but each time the lights went out we could see nothing . . . We watched
it for four or live minutes until it circled out of sight."

Ken Johnson, owner
of the Piedmont Boat Dock, confirmed the women's story. Shortly be- fore
they saw the UFO leaving the water, unnamed campers told Johnson they had
seen a "bright light moving right under the surface of the lake."
These latter "aimed a flashlight beam at the traveling light and it
went out immediately."

Later in March two
divers from the East Side Divers Supply Company of Granite City, Ill.,
made three attempts to explore the lake for evidence of the underwater
UFO. Unfortunately, unusually heavy spring rainfall (seven inches in March)
had raised the water level 30 feet above normal. The lake was extremely
murky and the divers found nothing in its depths.

GRAND TOWER, Ill.,
on the Illinois-Missouri border, is almost 60 miles northeast of Piedmont
but the UFO Oscar Wills sighted the evening of March 22 sounds very much
like those from Brushy Creek.

Wills, an operating
engineer at the Central Illinois Public Service Company's power generating
station on the Mississippi one and a half miles from Grand Tower, first
saw the object when fellow-employee, Willis Hughes called from his home
to say something was hovering over the transformer yard.

"I went out
by myself to take a look," Wills recounted in an interview with FATE,
"and there it was, hovering about 1500 feet in the air and about 200
yards from me.

"It was a round
saucer-shaped object about 25 to 30 feet in diameter. It looked like a
high-intensity red light with a lot of lights coming out of what seemed
to be portholes. The lights were flashing and causing a spinning effect.
I couldn't see any image of its bottom, which may have been concave, I'm
not sure.

"I kept walking
and got to within 100 yards of it. I looked at it for two or three minutes
until it darted behind the power plant almost like a blur. I went north
of the power plant to see where it had gone and found it hovering over
a water intake pump on the other side of the station. I stood there for
a couple of minutes and watched it."

Wills' vigil was
interrupted by a phone call from another employee (not Hughes) who wanted
to know what was going on. By the time Wills got off the phone and enlisted
two other men to go outside with him the UFO was gone.

Wills then called
Hughes who informed him the object had flown across the river and disappeared
into the Missouri hills. Within minutes, however, Wills and his crew saw
four jet planes making passes over the plant area as if searching.

"The most amazing
part," Wills says, " is the way this object moved rapidly with
no effort and perfectly silently. I just can't get over that. I don't know
what it was but I know this much: we don't have anything like this. "

Wills claimed that
a nearly identical object appeared over Grand Tower nearly a month later,
on the evening of April 16.

On the night of Wills'
first encounter, March 22, back in Piedmont newsman Dennis Kenney of local
radio station KPWB saw "a big orange light, glowing from white to
orange. it appeared to just go out and then would come back on." Gary
Sutton, who was with him, snapped eight pictures of it with a 35mm Petri
camera loaded with black-and-white infrared film. These photographs show
a ball-shaped object with a bright glowing band across its midsection.
This sighting took place at 7:30 P.M.

Three hours earlier,
at 4:30, a UFO had made a rare daytime appearance. Joe King of Mill Spring
and Ron Miller of Piedmont, both students at Southeast Missouri State University
(Cape Girardeau), were traveling along Highway 34 near Patterson (eight
miles east of Piedmont) when they noticed an oval-shaped object above the
nearby treetops. The UFO, "metallic" in appearance, flat on the
bottom with a dome on the top, was moving rapidly and leaving no vapor
trail.

The following evening,
Friday, March 23, Leonard Adams and his 13-year-old daughter Alma of Piedmont
encountered a "high-intensity, bright white light" at 7:10.

"It blinked
on and off," Alma recounted, "and every time it blinked it shot
up 10 feet. When it got about 300 to 500 feet in the air red and green
lights came on and then the object flew horizontally.

"Actually the
red and green lights were very dull in comparison with the white light,
which was so intense that our eyes couldn't adjust to it. The light was
almost blinding. The farther away the object got, the better you could
see the other lights."

The UFO passed over
radio station KPWB, which was not on the air at the time. The next morning
the station was unable to sign on because one of its transformers had blown
out. Hayden Hewes of IUFOB believes the Adamses' UFO may. have had something
to do with the malfunction but the station's news director Dennis Hovis,
who has conducted his own exhaustive probe into the Brushy Creek flap,
disagrees. "It could have been from any number of causes," he
says.

FATE could not confirm
any reports of so-called electromagnetic effects but Hovis assured us that
some local residents told him of radio and television interference when
a UFO was close by. "These people say that when the TV starts rolling
and reception gets bad, they can go outside and see a flying object,"
Hovis says, adding that some witnesses have heard sounds from the objects
-- "a sort of high-speed drilling sound."

Among other reports
Hovis has collected is one from a Patterson farm family who heard a high-pitched
drilling sound which began around 10 o'clock in the evening all during
April. Sometimes it was so loud it shook their house. Too frightened to
go outside, they had not, at the time of this writing, discovered its cause.
Hovis refuses to release their names to us, explaining that the family
in question gave the story to him in confidence.

THE SINGLE most important
UFO sighting occurred on April 3 in the daylight. It involved a landing
of sorts and provided some physical evidence.

Mrs. Raymond Stucker
of Ellsinore traveling down Highway 60 at about noon "saw this thing
in the air off to the side of the road," she told IUFOB investigators.
". . . It looked like something I never saw before. It was round,
with the exception of a dome on top . . . three . . . one on top of the
other. (*Hewes explains that this means the object had three Pyramiding
domes on top, each one smaller than the one below It.) It appeared to have
a dull band or something going around the center. The bottom had something
like a tripod landing gear.

"The object
was hovering just above treetop level off to the right of the road . .
. There is a possibility that it came up from the ground and stopped right
above the trees."

She said the UFO
was silent and appeared to be made of aluminum.

Two days later Mrs.
Stucker led IUFOB officials to the area where they found trees in a 35-
foot circle turned counter-clockwise with some of their tips broken off.
Geiger counters failed to pick up any unusual radiation but they found
a mysterious "ash" near the tops of the trees although there
was no evidence the trees had burned.

On Friday, April
13, newsman Hovis and a physicist from Southeast Missouri State University
(who has asked not to be identified) made four sightings in the space of
three and a half hours. The skeptical scientist had come from Cape Girardeau
to see the UFOs for himself and he was not disappointed.

Hovis and the physicist
had set up a telescope with a degree-finder on the side in an area near
Black River seven miles south-east of Piedmont. At 7:18 P.M. the men saw
what Hovis calls a "a light -- no visible body or object attached
to it -- white in color with some yellow." It was moving from north
to south at a 10-degree angle off the horizon. The unnamed physicist speculated
it might be a satellite.

At 7:28 a similar
iight appeared, moving in the same direction, five degrees off the horizon.

This time the scientist
suggested that the booster had followed the satellite into orbit.

But by 9:30 when
the third object cruised across the sky the man's faith in satellites was
shaken. This object was traveling south to north, 10 degrees off the horizon
and for a brief period it flew toward the witnesses before resuming its
northbound course. A fourth UFO, heading from north to south at 10 degrees
off the horizon, passed by at 10:45, leaving behind a deeply perplexed
scientist.

WHILE NO one has
reported seeing UFO occupants Reggie Bone does have a strange story to
relate of something he, his wife and two other couples saw around Christmastime
in 1971 when they were driving down a little-traveled road in a deserted
section of the Brushy Creek area. The time was about 2:00 A.M.

"Suddenly,"
Bone says, "we saw this fellow walking up the road toward us in a
frogman's outfit. He was wearing flippers or something resembling them
on his feet and he was carrying something in his hands.

"We couldn't
see very well -- visibility was poor -- so we couldn't see his face but
his body was completely covered. The suit didn't look wet. Black River
is about a quarter-mile away from the road but it's rather inaccessible
from the point where we ran into this figure.

"The temperature
was well below freezing and I don't know of anyone who lives in that area.
We were so taken aback that nobody even said anything for several miles.
Finally somebody asked, 'Did you see that?' "

Bone, with Hovis,
has carefully studied the local UFO situation and does not necessarily
connect the figure with the mysterious aerial phenomena but he does admit
that the recent sightings recalled the earlier incident to his mind. He
says he and Hovis found that UFOs have been seen regularly in the more
remote sections of Brushy Creek since 1967.

To the UFOlogist,
Bone's 1971 encounter is reminiscent of numerous landing reports that include
beings dressed in what witnesses almost invariably describe as "diving
suits." A more mundane explanation for this incident may exist but
the story deserves being recorded here for whatever it may be worth.

Dennis Hovis offers
the only possible commentary on Brushy Creek's flying saucer onslaught:
"I don't know what we're seeing but I do know we're seeing something.
It's not swamp gas and it's not satellites either. On the other hand, I
can't say they're aliens -- I'm just a newsman, not a scientist.

"All I'll say
is this, this is some kind of aerial phenomenon. It's simply unexplainable.
From the reading I've done lately, I guess that these things always have
been around and no one anywhere has ever been able to explain them. "